Free Online Journalism Classes Begin To Gain Ground

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

P2PU...demonstrates the power of asynchronous communication and online tools for learning."

The CEO of Creative Commons, Joi Ito, is currently teaching a free online journalism class through Peer 2 Peer University, an online community of “open study groups for short university-level courses.” The online class syncs with a graduate-level class Ito teaches at Keio University in Japan, and features a UStream presentation and IRC chat once a week.

ADVERTISEMENT

Joi Ito

IRC chat? Yes, the class glues together tools like UStream and IRC, and the platform, which was built on a Drupal base, continues to evolve. P2PU’s organizers make it clear they know the tools aren’t perfect, so they’re using feedback from participants to refine things as they go.

I joined the class at the last minute. The New York Times had written about P2PU in April, as well as other open learning communities outside of traditional institutions. I stumbled across the article while searching the word “edupunks.”

A Proposal

The concept of providing coaching outside of traditional educational institutions has fascinated me for close to a year. I’m focused on how professional journalists can share their knowledge with new creators of online content, be they “citizen journalists,” neighborhood activists or seasoned newspaper people working on building online skills.

ADVERTISEMENT

In the fall, I submitted a Knight News Challenge proposal for an online class, 260 Open, with face-to-face components. Students would have been required to produce coverage of civic events, and experienced journalists would have edited their work closely. The concept was designed to not only spread civic knowledge, media literacy and strong journalism skills, but also to increase the amount of news coverage in particular communities.

Then, in May, I pitched the concept at the news entrepreneur boot camp held at the Knight Digital Media Center at the University of Southern California. One strength of that pitch was that many others at the boot camp are building news organizations with educational components to broaden the capacity of communities to help cover their own news.

What I needed, though, was a proven business model with customers who can pay.

Certainly, many large media companies are seeking help from their respective communities in covering the news, and the need exists to improve skills in communities that have lost local news coverage. But finding actual paying customers willing to support classes for the public good is a tough nut to crack. As large companies rush to create content to wrap around new online local ads for small businesses, though, perhaps the business model will become clearer.

P2PU

In contrast, P2PU isn’t focusing on the business model at the moment. Instead, organizers are building a community, refining tools and experimenting. That’s inspiring.

In fact, Mozilla teamed up with Hacks & Hackers in a collaboration launched at Knight’s recent Future of News and Civic Media conference to use P2PU to allow programmers to teach journalists and journalists to teach programmers. Mozilla and P2PU are also launching the School of Webcraft, with a call for course proposals by July 18.

P2PU’s current journalism class has shown me that perhaps it’s possible to just start, with imperfect tools, even before funding or business models are clear.

In Charlotte, where I’m based, media folks have demonstrated a commitment to peer coaching and support with some journo/bloggers meetups. We just started holding them, with little regard to organizational structure. David Cohn of Spot.Us showed up via Skype for one meeting.

P2PU shows that possibilities exist. It demonstrates the power of asynchronous communication and online tools for learning, as students in Japan go to class at 9 a.m. on a Monday and I listen and watch at 8 p.m. on a Sunday, at the same time. It’s quite a time shifter, right out of “Harry Potter.”

What’s Next

What I’d like to see next: Take the concept to local communities, with tools that individuals can use to easily create independent, civic journalism courses. Those classes could be augmented with local meetups to strengthen ties and build strong networks. Local journalists familiar with the civic and social nuances of particular communities would add unmatched value.

Perhaps there’s a business model in there somewhere. But, more importantly, the concept provides more tools for journalists to share knowledge and perhaps help sustain themselves as teachers and coaches, while broadening the capacity for communities to tell their own stories.

Maybe we can make it so. What do you think?

Andria Krewson is editor for two community sections of the McClatchy-owned Charlotte Observer in Charlotte, N.C. She is @underoak on Twitter.

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

Hi Andria – Thanks for the nice article (and gentle words about our ongoing tech improvement). P2PU is a platform for experimentation. If you want to make journalism courses available to more people and combine the online part with offline meetings – we’d love to be involved. Especially the tie in between online and offline is something that a few people in the P2PU community are interested in exploring.

Come to think of it, my first journalism education was almost free and “online.” While on line at the local magazine shop buying the Sunday papers, I spotted a book (“Watch Your Language”) by Theodore Bernstein of the Times for $2, right after someone invited me to be copyeditor of the school paper. Whatever gets you started gets you started.

Thanks, all, for the comments, and sorry for the delay in getting back here.

The P2PU class has been great. One assignment in particular was challenging and illuminating: Post three times a day. I didn’t quite make it, but consistent practice seems to be a key factor in learning anything.

I urge anyone interested in free business journalism training to check out the offerings from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism at BusinessJournalism.org. We offer both free Webinars and regional workshops.

How can so many journalism startups continue without a business model? Is everyone expected to work for free? Are the programmers working for free? Are the professionals all donating their time? Forever?

As a lover of journalism who supports myself from the advertising side, isn’t it obvious who your advertisers and sponsors would be for this program? I can name ten off the top of my head who will kill to be in front of an audience seeking higher learning.

The newspaper world is dying because their online revenue models do not support the process of running their business. And with all the study on revenue models the big idea is a “paywall”. And all that paywall will do is drive news readers to other free sites to get what is easily available and supported by advertising.

Someone has to start thinking about the money and business side of these websites in order to support all these great ideas. Otherwise, they will soon be dust in the wind.

Media is the booming sector for today’s world. So lot of new generation students are interested to the journalism courses provided by some premier institutes in India.

ADVERTISEMENT

ADVERTISEMENT

Who We Are

MediaShift is the premier destination for insight and analysis at the intersection of media and technology. The MediaShift network includes MediaShift, EducationShift, MetricShift and Idea Lab, as well as workshops and weekend hackathons, email newsletters, a weekly podcast and a series of DigitalEd online trainings.